UNC Hussman graduate students present work at the 2026 Graduate Research Symposium

Doctoral Student, Hussman School of Journalism and Media

Framing Latino Immigrants: Threat and Counter-Narratives in News and Social Media

This study examines how U.S. news and social media portray Latino immigrants through threat-based framing and the counter-narratives that challenge it. Drawing on Chávez’s (2008, 2013) concept of the Latino Threat Narrative, this study combines deductive coding of threat frames with inductive thematic analysis of newspaper articles and posts collected from X. The findings show that threat-based portrayals remained prominent across both media environments but took different forms. Latino-targeted threats appeared more directly on X, while news coverage relied more often on generalized anti-immigrant framing and emphasized criminality more heavily. The inductive phase identified five recurring counter-narrative themes that challenged threat-based discourse through different persuasive pathways, including coherence and fidelity. These findings suggest that immigration discourse across media is shaped by competing portrayals rather than a single dominant narrative and that the Latino Threat Narrative remains active even as its contemporary forms continue to evolve.

Colonial Legacies in Culture of News Consumption: How Colonialism Does and Does Not Shape News Avoidance Today

News avoidance varies substantially cross nationally, but existing research has primarily emphasized individual level factors and contemporary environmental factors. Less attention has been given to historical country level factors systematically evaluating if a country’s history of colonialism correlates to news avoidance rates we see today cross nationally. This study is the first attempt to systematically evaluate if a country’s history of colonialism correlates to news avoidance rates we see today cross nationally. Building on the model developed by Toff and Kalogeropoulus (2020), and adding colonial history as an additional country level predictor. It employs a large-scale quantitative, comparative approach to analyze Reuters 2024 Digital news report data, with over 67,000 survey respondents across 47 countries. The results indicate that colonial history is significantly associated with selective news avoidance. Countries with a colonial history demonstrated lower levels of selective news avoidance than countries without a colonial history. The hierarchical regression further indicates that adding colonial history provides additional explanatory power, suggesting that colonial history should be incorporated as an additional country level factor in Toff and Kalogeropoulos’s (2020) model of news avoidance.

These findings suggest that historical institutional factors may contribute to contemporary cross national differences in news avoidance and highlight the potential importance of colonial legacies in understanding contemporary media systems and audience behaviors.

Doctoral Student, Hussman School of Journalism and Media

“You’re an Argumentative Woman”: A Content Analysis of Controlling Images of Black Women in the Black Manosphere on YouTube

Existing studies on the manosphere center the radicalization of white men toward anti-feminist and far-right extremism, leaving Black manosphere communities and the women they target unexamined. In these spaces, Black women are systematically disparaged as misogynoir reinforces harmful stereotypes, legitimizes their denigration, and sustains structural harms online and offline.

Using Patricia Hill Collins’ framework of controlling images, this study examines how historical tropes about Black women, including the Mammy, Matriarch, Jezebel, and Angry Black Woman, are deployed by Black manosphere creators. Using deductive qualitative content analysis, this study analyzed 14 YouTube videos from two Black manosphere YouTubers, Chisha Zed and Mediocre Tutorials and Reviews (MTR).

Analysis revealed the pervasiveness of the Jezebel and Angry Black Woman tropes. The Jezebel image appeared through manosphere-coded language, where creators used terms like “modern women”, “freaks”, and “easy” to characterize women as hypersexual, visually reinforced by citing long nails, false lashes, and weaves as evidence of promiscuity. The Angry Black Woman trope framed Black women as combative and aggressive, portraying their anger as a cultural defect rather than a rational response to provocation. The Mammy and Matriarch stereotypes were largely absent.

This study argues that Black manosphere content facilitates ritualized bonding, in which creators and fans collectively degrade Black women. MTR’s livestreams functioned as ritualized degradative spectacles wherein he and his viewers evaluated Black women’s physical appearances and discussed their value as wives or sexual conquests, reflecting the visual and discursive logics of historical slave auctions.

Ultimately, this study shows that the Black manosphere adopts and adapts controlling images of Black women, reinforces historically destructive narratives about their worth, and perpetuates their denigration online and offline.

Master’s Student, Hussman School of Journalism and Media

When Media Becomes the Battlespace: Cognitive Warfare and the Emerging Security Gap in the Platform Era

The relationship between war and media is more than just a history of technological development. It is a process of co-evolution in which war and media shape each other. Each new medium has changed how people see and understand war. In the past, messengers carried news from the battlefield; photography let people see images of war from a distance. Television brought war scenes into people’s homes, and satellite broadcasts let viewers watch events as they happened. Today, drones and smartphones capture footage that is shared on online platforms, and algorithms decide what people see.

This study asks what is new about cognitive warfare and how that novelty relates to changes in media. Through a conceptual review of existing literature, it examines cognitive warfare’s relationship to propaganda, psychological operations, information warfare, and influence campaigns. It also considers Russia’s reflexive control and China’s Three Warfares as earlier approaches to shaping perceptions and decisions.

The analysis argues that the main goals and ideas of cognitive warfare have largely stayed the same; the big change is the media environment in which influence happens. With digital platforms, influence campaigns can run constantly in everyday civilian life, with users acting as both creators and sharers of content. This makes it harder to separate military and civilian roles, war and peace, and communication from real action.

The study defines cognitive warfare as the intentional use of both military and non-military methods to influence decisions and behavior for strategic purposes. In today’s platform era, media is not just a way to send messages—it is now part of the battlespace. At this intersection of media and security, it is difficult to identify who is involved, who is being targeted, and what the effects are. Cognitive effects are also hard to see and measure. This gap is presented as an implication for further research, rather than an empirically established finding.

Master’s Student, Hussman School of Journalism and Media

This project was co-authored by Yihan Huang

“Undo” Influence: Testing the efficacy of social media literacy content on reducing body image dissatisfaction on Instagram

Social media literacy interventions have shown promise in reducing appearance-focused social media content’s harmful effects on body image and disordered eating among young adult women. Due to unique challenges in implementing structured interventions for young adults, researchers have suggested alternative interventions, such as recruiting content creators to share social media literacy information or embedding social media literacy messages into platform features. However, studies have yet to experimentally address the potential efficacy of “in-the-moment” interventions and the mechanisms through which they can protect young adult women’s body image while using social media.

This work-in-progress posttest-only, between-subjects experiment examines if viewing information about social media literacy alongside appearance-based content can protect young adult women’s body image attitudes through reducing social comparisons. Participants will be young adult women aged 18-24 years-old who use Instagram (target n=339). Participants will be randomly assigned to view a simulated Instagram feed containing 12 posts on Qualtrics. Conditions will be a low volume (1) or high volume (3) of informational posts on social media literacy situated in between “influencer” posts featuring upward social comparison targets. Participants assigned to the control feed will only view “influencer” posts.

State body image and appearance-based upward social comparison will be measured following exposure. A mediation analysis will be used to test for a significant path in which a higher volume of informational social media literacy content in the simulated feed is associated with lower appearance-based upward comparisons, which in turn is associated with greater body image satisfaction. Findings will help inform efforts by health professionals and educators to improve body image and reduce disordered eating among young adult women.

Master’s Student, Hussman School of Journalism and Media

Militancy or Righteous Anger?: The Protest Paradigm and Black Athlete Activism

Existing scholarship on media and Black athlete activism has often highlighted the Black press as an “organ of protest,” while ascribing to the mainstream media a role of upholding the status quo. To examine these notions, a qualitative textual analysis of coverage about Black athlete activism in both mainstream and Black press outlets was conducted. The analysis, guided by Chan and Lee’s (1984) protest paradigm framework, considers two seminal periods of protest in sports: the 1968 Mexico City Olympics and the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement. Ultimately, this paper argues that the Black press’s role in characterizing protest is more nuanced than previous literature would suggest, best evidenced by the Chicago Defender’s explicit criticism of Tommie Smith and John Carlos’ anthem protest, a position this paper attributes to a politics of respectability that often defined Black Americans’ navigation of historically white institutions in the Jim Crow and post-Civil Rights era. While The New York Times’ 1968 coverage was similarly undermining of Black athlete activists’ credibility, both outlets transitioned to a more legitimizing approach to the Black Lives Matter movement. This paper argues that the gradual erosion of respectability politics in sports, enabled by early Black athlete activists who assumed significant personal risk, created conditions for the more openly humanizing coverage that characterized both types of outlets in the Black Lives Matter era. It is also argued that recent shifts in protest paradigm, as suggested by Masullo et al. (2023), are characteristic of a shift in the status quo being enforced, rather than simply a shift towards more favorable coverage. Finally, it was found that the visibility of Black sportswomen engaging in activism has increased significantly, although still notably treated as secondary to male activism.

Doctoral Student, Hussman School of Journalism and Media

Framing Latino Immigrants: Threat and Counter-Narratives in News and Social Media

This study examines how U.S. news and social media portray Latino immigrants through threat-based framing and the counter-narratives that challenge it. Drawing on Chávez’s (2008, 2013) concept of the Latino Threat Narrative, this study combines deductive coding of threat frames with inductive thematic analysis of newspaper articles and posts collected from X. The findings show that threat-based portrayals remained prominent across both media environments but took different forms. Latino-targeted threats appeared more directly on X, while news coverage relied more often on generalized anti-immigrant framing and emphasized criminality more heavily. The inductive phase identified five recurring counter-narrative themes that challenged threat-based discourse through different persuasive pathways, including coherence and fidelity. These findings suggest that immigration discourse across media is shaped by competing portrayals rather than a single dominant narrative and that the Latino Threat Narrative remains active even as its contemporary forms continue to evolve.

Doctoral Student, Hussman School of Journalism and Media

This project was co-authored by John Chrobak

Reconsidering Russian Disinformation Networks: Mapping the International Pro-Kremlin Ecosystem on Telegram

In May of 2025, the French agency tasked with detecting foreign digital interference identified Storm-1516, a Kremlin-aligned foreign information manipulation operation aimed at undermining support for Ukraine and democratic institutions. This article uses Storm-1516 seed accounts on Telegram to map the broader ecosystem surrounding the operation as a means of examining how connected actors cluster and interact. The network is comprised of over 116 thousand accounts that divide into 13 communities. The findings reveal that three language communities, Russian, English and German, account for the majority of accounts in the network, and that key individual actors act as the primary inter-community brokers in what is mostly a compartmentalized ecosystem. Furthermore, despite the multinational nature of the seed, Russian-language accounts serve as the network’s structural backbone. This study contributes to better understanding the importance of influencers as information brokers bridging digital communities and their role in the structure of FIMI campaigns.

Master’s Student, Hussman School of Journalism and Media

Sharenting and the Next Generation: Young Adults’ Perceptions of Online Privacy

Parents and guardians are often positioned as the primary protectors of children’s online privacy and tasked with the role of safeguarding their personal information on the internet. These parental figures, however, can be the people most responsible for violating their child’s consent and shaping weak privacy-regulating habits. Analysis into how parental social media use during a person’s childhood can leave lasting impacts on their understanding of internet privacy is lacking. This study uses survey and interview data to examine how young adults perceive their parents’ or guardians’ posting habits and how those perceptions relate to their own privacy-regulating behaviors in adulthood. Consent and the formation of online autonomy were also key focuses of this study. Surveys (n = 540) and interviews (n = 4) were conducted with young adults, revealing the following themes: (1) participants felt their parents regularly shared content about them online; (2) children felt a lack of control over their parents’ social media habits; (3) internet privacy habits in adulthood are shaped by various factors; and (4) willingness to post about future children. This work contributes to theory and holds practical implications for children’s online protection. The conceptual model offers a framework for understanding how parental social media use can lead to the formation of online habits in adulthood. Analysis of both survey and interview data also advises future policy creation and more informed consent procedures for parental posting.

Doctoral Student, Hussman School of Journalism and Media

Scrolling Girlhood Scripture: Extending the Adolescent Media Practice Model for Gen-Z Young Women

For Gen-Z young women, identity development unfolds within mobile, always-on environments. Smartphones are introduced during adolescence, a developmental period marked by heightened social sensitivity, expanding autonomy, and identity exploration. A sixth grader’s smartphone inserts constant connectivity into a life stage already defined by social intensity. Mobile media is an extension of social life: a personal, portable, persistent space of engagement. Drawing on in-depth interviews and screen culture ethnography, young women’s narrated experiences of growing-up online are centered alongside digital archives and present-day screen habits. Mobile media tethering explains a persistent behavioral attachment to devices shaping cognition, attention, habitual use, and routines. For Gen-Z young women, devices are like a second pulse: always present; involuntary. Habits sustained by smartphone use places heightened demands on visibility, responsiveness, and relational labor. Methodologically, this study attunes to the expressive qualities of girlhood speech, where meaning can be communicated through hyperbole, humor, and satirical affect. A hybrid screen-share approach captures these voices as they unfold, preserving participants’ meaning-making without filtering through evaluative frames. Through screen-sharing and co-present exploration, mobile devices and social media are treated as sites of cultural practice. Guided by the Adolescent Media Practice Model (AMPM), this study shows its core processes—selection, interaction, application, and identity—are reconfigured under constant connectivity. Selection: through entry into digital platforms where participation is assumed. Interaction: continuous, visible, and socially evaluated. Application: through habitual engagement, filling idle time. Identity: recursively through engagement with one’s digital record, as young women revisit past posts, curate self-presentation, and anticipate a future shaped by digital archives.

Master’s Student, Hussman School of Journalism and Media

Grounds for Trust: Reviewer Authority and Chinese-Origin Robot Vacuum Brands on YouTube

According to IDC, five Chinese-origin companies—Roborock, ECOVACS, Dreame, Xiaomi, and Narwal—accounted for 67.8% of the global robot vacuum market in 2025. With these brands available through U.S. retailers, YouTube reviews show how reviewers justify expectations of performance, reliability, maintenance, and support. Building on creator credibility and product evaluation research, this study asks how U.S.-based reviewers link their credentials to brand trustworthiness and whether Chinese origin enters these judgments.

Drawing on source credibility theory and the conceptual framework of epistemic authority, the study adopts abductive qualitative discourse analysis. The corpus so far comprises 17 videos from 16 U.S.-based channels (12 single-product and 5 comparative/ranking reviews), published between November 2024 and September 2026. Brand origin is defined by founding background rather than current ownership or manufacturing location. The analysis covers spoken evaluations, visual evidence, and commercial disclosures. Further sampling and systematic coding are planned.

Initial observations suggest reviewers justify evaluations through performance tests, sustained household use, and recommendations qualified by price and household needs. Some extend judgments about a single model to the brand as a whole, drawing on experience across multiple models and the availability of replacement parts. Disagreement over whether lab testing reflects everyday use highlights competing grounds for evaluative authority. No transcript or description explicitly invoked Chinese origin as a basis for trustworthiness judgments, including in cross-brand comparisons.

By examining reviewers’ authority claims alongside their brand evaluations, this study asks how product evidence is extended into, and used to qualify, broader expectations of brands. It distinguishes Chinese origin as a sampling criterion from an evaluative resource explicitly invoked in review discourse.